How Do You Delete Your Story on Snapchat

Snapchat has been one of the major success stories as far as messaging apps. If you’re already a user, you know how the “Snaps” work — the pictures and video clips that you can caption or even draw on (in case of the pictures) before sending them to one or more of the friends on your contact list. In October 2013, Snapchat rolled out the Snapchat Stories feature. This gives you a way to share longer series of events with your friends. The Snapchat website describes it as a vehicle for sharing “your day with friends — or everyone.“

If you’ve made a Story, you know that it involves linking pics and videos together. All you have to do is press your own name in the list, and then add the pic or clip you just took to your Story. Each Snap stays up for 24 hours, and you can identify each Snap with a tag line that you have to give it when you save it.

However, you may not like some or all of a Story that you have uploaded. In that case, you can remove as much of it as you want. This article answers the question, “How do you delete your Story on Snapchat?”

First, open up the app, and then pull up the “My Friends” screen. Your name appears at the top of the list, so click on it. This will bring up a list of the Snaps that you have put together into your Story. Each Snap represents its own section.

Next, press the name of the part of the Story that you want to delete. If you want to delete the entire Story, you have to do it one Snap at a time, so start with the first Snap. After tapping the name, then tap the gear that appears on the right side. Tapping the gear brings up a list of options, so choose “Delete” from that menu. That part of the Story vanishes.

Now you might be wondering if that really makes the Story disappear. According to a story in the Huffington Post, if you have an Android phone, the pictures that you receive stay in the phone’s cache, although it takes a special software program to unearth it. While you probably don’t have the software, if someone has sent you an inappropriate Snap and you have an Android, law enforcement professionals could find it on your phone.

How does this relate to a Story? Well, if you send out a Snap as part of your Story that contains an inappropriate image, and someone views it on an Android, that Snap could stay in that person’s phone. Even if you delete the Snap from your Story (or all the Snaps in the Story), it could remain in that person’s cache. There is also some doubt as to whether the Snapchat servers actually purge all of the messages as they claim.

Either way, you want to make sure that the images and clips you send on Snapchat are not going to run afoul of the law. Prepare yourself for the fact that everything you post on the Internet could come back to haunt you in some way. If you have that mindset, you’ll be much wiser as you share on social media.